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For Democrats who care deeply about progressive causes, Donald Trump’s presidency was a frightening experience. It was also a call to action. Progressive campaigns and causes experienced a huge spike in donations over the past four years, and in 2020 candidates up and down the ballot far outpaced fund-raising records from previous cycles.

They found that these donors were feeling more positive about Democrats in Washington than in years past, and that they remained energized — but a significant chunk of them were in fact planning to donate less, now that Trump is out of office.

After Mr. Trump’s defeat, there have been some signs of donor burnout. Close to nine out of 10 respondents said Mr. Trump had been one of the top factors driving them to donate in recent years. And upward of one in five grass-roots donors said they were now likely to cut back on their gifts to candidates and political parties.

A nonprofit group that helps Black and marginalized communities in Kentucky has received a six-figure donation from a white donor who says they recently inherited family wealth — and then learned that their great-grandfather owned enslaved people.

As they received their windfall, the inheritor grew curious about the origins of the family's money."They investigated their family history to find out their great-grandfather had enslaved six individuals in Bourbon [County], Ky.," Croney said as the nonprofit announced the donation this week.

Because the great-grandfather did not record the enslaved persons' names, the donor couldn't track down the descendants of the people the ancestor had owned. Croney said that because the donor was "aware of how hoarding wealth is a huge contributing factor of inequity in this country, they decided that they should give most of it away."

President Biden, heeding widespread calls to step up his response to the pandemic’s surge abroad, said on Monday that his administration would send 20 million doses of federally authorized coronavirus vaccine overseas in June — the first time he has pledged to give away doses that could be used in the United States.

“We know America will never be fully safe until the pandemic that’s raging globally is under control,” Mr. Biden said in a brief appearance at the White House. “No ocean’s wide enough, no wall’s high enough, to keep us safe.”

International health activists want far more.“Donating 80 million doses of vaccines without a plan to scale up production worldwide is like putting a Band-Aid on a machete wound,” said Gregg Gonsalves, a longtime AIDS activist.

A growing number of companies and institutions have taken actions against President Trump and his associates since the deadly rampage at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday by the president’s supporters.

Facebook’s announcement came four days after it banned Mr. Trump from posting on its platform at least through the end of his term — after years of defending its hands-off approach.

And several digital platforms — including Snapchat, YouTube, Twitch, Reddit and Twitter — also recently limited or suspended Mr. Trump on their services.

The longstanding alliance between big business and the Republican Party is being tested as never before.

As President Trump and his allies sought to overturn the election results in recent months, chief executives condemned their efforts and called on Republicans to stop meddling with the peaceful transfer of power.

Dozens of companies, from AT&T to Walmart, have said they will no longer donate to members of Congress who opposed the Electoral College certification of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Florida Republican Sen. Rick Scott, the new chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, defended President Donald Trump on Wednesday when asked if his ally bore any responsibility for inciting a riot at the US Capitol, putting the onus of last week's death and destruction instead on the mob.

"He's not the one who made the decision to breach this Capitol," Scott said.

Scott's comments came as the pro-Trump riot has torn apart the Republican Party, setting off a backlash among some donors, a historic second impeachment of the President and a fight over how best to build a path back to power.

Record numbers of Americans felt strongly favorable or unfavorable toward Trump during his time in office. (The strongly favorable and unfavorable was 71% in a Fox News poll last month, for instance.)

Trump's presidency drove historic turnout and record donations to political campaigns in a country whose voters have often shown a disinterest in politics.

The 2020 campaign, by comparison, had a little less than 160 million voters participate

The 2020 election has blown past previous records to become the most expensive campaign in American history, with the final tally for the battle for the White House and control of the Senate and the House expected to hit nearly $14 billion, according to new projections made by the Center for Responsive Politics.

The surge of spending is powered by donations at both ends of the giving spectrum as small donors, particularly online, are playing an increasingly central role in funding campaigns. At the same time, billionaires and multimillionaires are writing enormous checks to super PACs.

Mr. Biden’s campaign committee, which had raised $938 million as of Oct. 14, is on track to be the first to surpass $1 billion in fund-raising. The fund-raising hauls by both Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump, when combined with party money, already far exceed that threshold.

Ms. Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, will be one of four people on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Florida

Scheduled to launch late this year, it is to be the first crewed mission to circle Earth in which no one on board is a professional astronaut.

Ms. Arceneaux could become the youngest American ever to travel to orbit. She will also be the first person with a prosthetic body part to go to space.

My guests are author David Wallace-Wells, who wrote the book “The Uninhabitable Earth,” and Genevieve Guenther, climate communication activist and founder of the organization, End Climate Silence.

genevieve guentherAll right, well, let me talk about this point that you shouldn’t have kids or you should have one fewer kid to lower your carbon footprint because it’s misanthropic and it’s just wrong. So there was one study that came up with the top personal carbon footprint actions, and one of them was have one fewer kid. But if you dig down into that study you see that they assume that the consumption of parenthood would remain the same with each subsequent kid. People in the global south generally have large families. And it hasn’t increased their carbon emissions at all. It’s not the kids, it’s the consumption.

genevieve guenther

To hear Bankman-Fried tell it, the idea was to make billions through his crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research, and FTX, the exchange he created for it — funneling the proceeds into the humble cause of “bed nets and malaria,” thereby saving poor people’s lives.

ast summer Bankman-Fried was telling The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus something quite different. “He told me that he never had a bed-nets phase, and considered neartermist causes — global health and poverty — to be more emotionally driven,” Lewis-Kraus wrote in August. Effective altruists talk about both “neartermism” and “longtermism.

Bankman-Fried said he wanted his money to address longtermist threats like the dangers posed by artificial intelligence spiraling out of control. As he put it, funding for the eradication of tropical diseases should come from other people who actually cared about tropical diseases: “Like, not me or something.”

Len Kendall, co-founder of the new micro-payments platform, reckons the problem isn’t so much that people don’t want to pay for things, but that they forget, it’s too much hassle, and the amounts involved are too big. CentUp, as the name suggests, deals in pennies. To give a few cents to your favorite blogger, all you do is click a little button and send the amount from a pre-charged account.

The contribution in itself isn’t great, but the collective amount could be. "We’re trying to increase the volume of giving by lowering the amount itself,"

There are billions of things being shared every day, and we thought: 'How can we take advantage of this very low investment action, and do something with it to help the world."

He largely avoided incessant talk about allegations of sexual assault by multiple women and claims that the election is rigged -- both of which made wavering Republicans nervous.

"Just thinking to myself right now, we should just cancel the election and just give it to Trump," he quipped during a rally in Toledo, Ohio.

But the Fox News poll, like some other recent surveys, suggested Trump is underperforming 2012 nominee Mitt Romney among this core constituency. Romney won white voters by 20 points over Obama according to exit polls, but Trump is only 14 points ahead of Clinton in the poll with the same voting group.

Fast forward a decade: The philosophy, sketched out privately at the Boston office of Brown Rudnick,is now at the center of an intense struggle for the soul of the Democratic Party.

This is more than a grudge match. At stake for the Democratic Party is the support of middle-class, swing voters who decide elections.

Many on the left were shocked, and angered. Warren’s allies saw Third Way as a proxy — being used by her enemies on Wall Street to scare off the rest of the party.

Apparently, all right-minded people want the "if-you-want-your-taxes-raised-why-don't-you-send-the-IRS-a-bigger-cheque" meme finally dead and buried. All right, but before we bury it let's see if we can understand it. I think it's childishly simple once you recognize that two separate questions are involved. Would IRS donations by Warren Buffett and Stephen King make the tax code fairer? No. Would IRS donations by Warren Buffett and Stephen King help to remedy the inequity they say the tax code causes? Yes. In other words, Warren Buffett and Stephen King should write generous checks to the IRS and not shut up, but keep demanding the fairer system they say they want.

“I’ve told my six-year-old daughter, ‘Running for office is real simple: you just surgically disconnect your shame sensor,’” he said. “Because you spend every day asking people for money.

Starting with the attack on the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law in 2003, opponents have won an accelerating series of victories against similar laws. The result has completely changed the world of campaign finance. Citizens United struck down limits on independent expenditures. SpeechNow made it possible for contributions to be largely hidden. Aggregate limits on personal contributions were swept away by McCutcheon v. FEC in 2014

even as it fails to rise to the top of most voters' agendas, majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents have voiced concern about the corrupting influence of money in polls, and the public generally supports spending caps.

In debates over the roles of law and government in promoting the equality of income or in redistributing the fruits of capitalism, widely different motives are attributed to those who favor or oppose capitalism or income redistribution. According to one view, largely accepted in the academic social psychology literature (Jost et al. 2003), opposition to income redistribution and support for capitalism reflect an orientation toward social dominance, a desire to dominate other groups. According to another view that goes back at least to the nineteenth century origins of Marxism, anti-capitalism and a support for greater legal efforts to redistribute income reflect envy for the property of others and a frustration with one’s lot in a capitalist system.

compared to anti-redistributionists, strong redistributionists have about two to three times higher odds of reporting that in the prior seven days they were angry, mad at someone, outraged, sad, lonely, and had trouble shaking the blues. Similarly, anti-redistributionists had about two to four times higher odds of reporting being happy or at ease. Not only do redistributionists report more anger, but they report that their anger lasts longer. When asked about the last time they were angry, strong redistributionists were more than twice as likely as strong opponents of leveling to admit that they responded to their anger by plotting revenge. Last, both redistributionists and anti-capitalists expressed lower overall happiness, less happy marriages, and lower satisfaction with their financial situations and with their jobs or housework. Further, in the 2002 and 2004 General Social Surveys anti-redistributionists were generally more likely to report altruistic behavior. In particular, those who opposed more government redistribution of income were much more likely to donate money to charities, religious organizations, and political candidates. The one sort of altruistic behavior that the redistributionists were more likely to engage in was giving money to a homeless person on the street.

In the United States, segments of the academic community seem to have reversed the relationship between pro-capitalism and income redistribution on the one hand, and racism and intolerance on the other. Those who support capitalism and oppose greater income redistribution tend to be better educated, to have higher family incomes, to be less traditionally racist, and to be less intolerant of unpopular groups. Those who oppose greater redistribution also tend to be more generous in donating to charities and more likely to engage in some other altruistic behavior. The academic assumption that anti-capitalism and opposition to income redistribution reflect an orientation toward social dominance seems unwarranted.

Tuna and Moskovitz were in their mid-20s in 2010 when they became the youngest couple ever to sign on to the Giving Pledge, the campaign started by Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett to encourage the world’s billionaires to commit to giving away most of their wealth.

They had little experience with philanthropy, but they believed that the bulk of the money Moskovitz had made — estimated to be $8.1 billion by Forbes — should be returned to society in their lifetimes.

they have narrowed their interests to four major “buckets”: U.S. policy, global catastrophic risks, international aid and science. They plan to announce their first major gifts in early 2015 and eventually hope to scale up to give away hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Two days after the midterm elections, I met up with a man named Ira Glasser, the former longtime head of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Glasser is a First Amendment absolutist. And to him, that means that he supports the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling on Citizens United because he believes virtually all campaign finance laws violate the First Amendment.

But what about what happens after the election? It is not the spending itself that is the problem, but rather the purpose of that spending.

Which Presidential Candidates Are Winning the Money Race

Hillary Rodham Clinton raised $29.9 million for her campaign in the third quarter, just ahead of Bernie Sanders, who raised $26.2 million.

Half of the reported money in the campaign so far has come from donations to groups outside the campaigns, like “super PACs,” that are not subject to limits.